Like Sands through the Hourglass December 9, 2009

Disappointment, I guess, is part of life.  The part where I’ve spent so much of my life trying to talk myself out of worse case scenarios.  The last few days have been a never ending parade of disappointing men.  I guess UPS has also been a little disappointing but I think of them as The Man, so they qualify for this complaint.

I am trying to think of times where I have not come through for others.  I am sure there have been some times, but I can’t come up with anything.

I’ll get over it, it’s just another thing I could do without.

Merit in the 70’s December 4, 2009

It is Friday night and I’m thinking I should just call this day quits and try again tomorrow.  I updated my sleep playlist with Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl), Time After Time, Linger and Sweet Jane.  I was listening to Brandy, which I have heard only a thousand times and for the first time heard all these amazing things.  All of this background that I was never aware of.  I am always confused and astounded when this happens.  Anyway, that’s what my weekend entertainment has come to; the musical integrity of Looking Glass.

Bea’s Song (River Trilogy Part II) December 4, 2009

Track 9 on the Cowboy Junkies 1996 album, Lay It Down.

Speed River at my feet running low and flat

I’m sitting here burning daylight thinking about the past

And that distance out there where the earth meets the sky

The slightest move and this river mud pulls me further down

John’s at my side, but he’s sitting on firmer ground

John says I look at the moon and the stars these days more often than I look into his eyes

And I can’t disagree

so I don’t say nothing

I just stare on past his face at Venus rising,

Like a shining speck of hope hanging over the horizon

With each passing year that I sit here that horizon seems to inch just that much nearer

And all that appears on it seems as clear as spit

But if there’s on thing in my life that these years have taught

It’s that you can always see it coming

But you can never stop it
Speed River at my feet running low and flat

I’m sitting here burning daylight thinking about the past

And that distance out there where the earth meets the sky

The slightest move and this river mud pulls me further down

John’s at my side, but he’s not noticing that I’m drowning

The slightest move and this river mud pulls me further down

John’s at my side, but he’s not noticing that I’m drowning

My So Called Anxiety December 4, 2009

I am doing a smidge of research tonight, mostly about Asperger’s.  I am hoping that if I can better understand my nephew maybe I can be a productive, proactive part of his life instead of someone who wants to scream at him, which is what I want to do now.

Diagnostic Criteria is a blast but there seems to be a lot of documentation on the lack of differences between the symptoms HFA, Autism in general and Asperger’s.  So I skip the deep research for now, this is not what I’m after anyway.

Comorbidity is what I’m really after, neurologically and psychologically.  I can’t find much about anxiety on it’s own but the occurrence of bipolar in people and relatives of people who meet the diagnostic criteria for a PDD is, more often than not, higher than in the normal population.  Interesting and not shocking.  It dawns on me that I don’t know anything about the rates of comorbidity between anxiety and bipolar disorder.  Trying to  look that up just gives me the symptom run around.  Data is telling me that most people who are bipolar have anxiety disorders but whether the anxiety is it’s own disorder or a symptom of the bipolar is up for grabs.  Thanks for nothing.

My last doctor was the first person who brought up my adult brain’s possible preoccupation with What If.  I don’t recall giving him any specific examples, but of course I wouldn’t have since I didn’t realize it was a problem.  At first, he just told me he was concerned about it.  At no point after that (January 2007) did I ask any questions or do any research on it. There is a brief spell of medication research while I sift through a list of possible additions to my cocktail of Could This Make Me Look Any Fucking Crazier*. The two I researched the most were topiramate and gabapentin.  They are highly effective treatments for the prevention of headaches (and the ones I have I think may kill me one day) and are prescribed off-label for bipolar disorder and off-off-label for anxiety and off-off-off label for depression.  He also includes fluoxetine, sertraline, paroxetine and even my final choice, clonazepam.
I notice that everything on the list he has given me is used in the treatment of anxiety.

“Hmmm, ” I say to my retarded self. “I wonder if that’s a coincidence?”

I still didn’t discuss it any further with him, but I didn’t have to because my next appointment was an emergency of sorts wherein I was in a constant state of worry over what would happen when I reached peak dosage at my current medication.  This turned into anxiety about anxiety.

“Maybe I should try minimizing the aggravating effects, like work and relationships.  I think I need a less stressful job, but what job isn’t stressful? Perhaps I should quit my job and move into a cave and sleep all day, everyday.  Why am I so worried about medication?  Does that mean it’s already not working?” Pretty soon I am cleaning the kitchen floor with a tooth brush, singing, pacing and sewing for 10 hours straight while listening to the radio and watching tv.  At night I am consuming mass quantities of Spanish red wine.

I think you see where this is going.  I have my appointment with him and refuse any new drugs and instead up my dose of lamotrigine.  I realize now that he wanted me to take additional medication to treat the anxiety.  At the time I thought it didn’t make sense to add more drugs to treat bipolar.  I go home and do well with the dose increase.  Things are fine until this same thing plays itself out again and again. Finally it gets so severe, so quickly that I don’t have time to do the appointment dance and I have to call his nurse.  It takes them approx. 1 nanosecond to prescribe a highly potent anxiolytic benzodiazepine.  I do a quick read through of it’s side effects, drowsiness, short-term memory loss, dizziness, lack of motivation, liver damage, incontinence, loss of libido.  Whatever. Is one of the side effects death? No? I’ll take it.

It works like a fucking charm.

* In treating mental illness it is not uncommon to take one drug that treats two different issues.

Possible Retroactive Categories November 30, 2009

Categories I thought of adding based on a review of crap I’ve written here:

I Suck at Dating
Jobs Everyone Thinks are Beneath Me but they are not Mentally Ill so Whatever
Sleeping with People You Work With Who You Have No Intention of Dating
My Consistency in Picking Inappropriate People to Have Relationships with
Prepositional Phrases
My So-Called Relationships
Moving to Another State for Reasons I Still Don’t Understand
Why is Every Corporation Trying to Rip Me Off
I Have Posted All the Lyrics in my Music Collection, This is a Repeat
HSV Sucks
HSV Saved Me
HSV, Having to Discuss It With Possible Partners and Realizing Sticking a Pencil in My Eye Would Be More Fun
Being Crazy, Rejection Because Of
HSV, Rejection Because Of
HSV, No One Gets Tested for It and That’s Kind of How I Wound Up With It
Things I Would Regret If I Regretted Things
People Who I Trusted That I Shouldn’t Have
Which Public School System Failed to Teach Me How To Spell
Which Parent Was Not a Good One
The Universe Gave Me The Worst Possible Odds
When My Medication Stops Working, Freaking Out Due to Possibility Of
I Wanna Be Sedated More Than I Already Am
I Hate Florida
I Love Florida
Are You My Mother?
The Trick is to Keep Breathing
Headache

Klonopin November 27, 2009

It is late and I’m prepared for my sleep.  Soon I will take out my contacts and brush my teeth, then I will collapse into my bed and have a tremendous and stress free sleep.  I am just waiting for the bathroom to be available.  I thought I’D WORK ON MY BEJEWELED BLITZ SCORE but I see here that I’m using caps, sorry, too tired to change this.  I thought I’d work on my bejeweled blitz score but I find that my coordination has become a joke, perhaps between god and…someone else.  I was not in on the joke and that’s a little funny.  Anyway, I am feeling better, good night.

An Isolated Incident of Topamax November 27, 2009

I am feeling like shit today and I can’t help but wonder if I missed a dose, or maybe took them too far apart.  The half life of lamotrigine ranges from about 12 to 103 hours, depending on every single factor you could imagine. There is a 90% chance that I’m going to take a Klonopin tonight.
I thought of all the things I could do today to keep my mind off my mind.  There is only express and international delivery today so I don’t have even a few hours to exhaust myself with work.  The gym is out because of the horrendous blisters, this also takes walking off the list and that is a shame because I could have really used the outside.  So I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned some more.  I can’t bother with the living room because the boys are running back and forth from their bedroom dropping toys at every point in between.  The problem with trying to push this away is that eventually I run out of cleaning or working or exercising and then the pit of yuck is still there, in my chest.  I will read, nap, maybe shower if I feel up to it.

When I start to feel like this I start existing more and more in my head and that in turn makes me feel more isolated.

P.S. If they offer me that Topamax again, I am taking it.

Hounds of Love November 27, 2009

Hounds of Love, the third single from Kate Bush’s 1985 album Hounds of Love

 

“It’s in the trees!
It’s coming!”

When I was a child:
Running in the night,
Afraid of what might be

Hiding in the dark,
Hiding in the street,
And of what was following me…

the hounds of love are hunting me
I’ve always been a coward,
And I don’t know what’s good for me.

Here I go! It’s coming for me through the trees.
Help me, someone! Help me, please!

Take my shoes off,
And throw them in the lake,
And I’ll be
Two steps on the water.

I found a fox
Caught by dogs.
He let me take him in my hands.

His little heart,
It beats so fast,
And I’m ashamed of running away

From nothing real–
I just can’t deal with this,
But I’m still afraid to be this,

Among your hounds of love,
And feel your arms surrounding me.
I’ve always been a coward,
I never know what’s good for me.
Well here I go, don’t let me go, hold me down
It’s coming for me through the trees.
Help me, darling
Help me, please!

Take my shoes off
And throw them in the lake,
And I’ll be
Two steps on the water.

I don’t know what’s good for me.
I don’t know what’s good for me.
I need la la la la la ya yo ya yo
Your love

Take your shoes off
And throw them in the lake!

Do you know what I really need?
Do you know what I really need?
I need la la la love yeah

Headaches Will be the Death of Me November 26, 2009

I can’t seem to pinpoint the exact location of this headache except to say that it is taking over the right side of my head.  It is getting worse and worse with each hour.  Nothing can satiate it and I started trying to treat it at about 8 this morning with an aleve.  At 10 I took an acetaminophen and at 11:30 two ibuprofen, then when I started my deviled eggs for thanksgiving at 1 I took another aleve.  I tried one last acetaminophen at 5:30, aleve at 9 and two more ibuprofen’s at midnight.  I thought I noticed a slight reprieve around 6, but I think it was a trick.  I’ve also had two cups of coffee, one glass of red wine and one screwdriver.  All of those things, medication included have a history of either helping my headaches, contributing to or causing them.  The medication I am taking for my total insanity is actually supposed to treat headaches. So basically, the universe is totally fucking my shit up.

After a headache has gone on for long enough and been particularly severe, as this one is it starts to make me weepy.  I am irritated at every spark of light, every bit of sound and every single molecule of every single thing.  I turn the lights on, I turn them off, I make the music louder, I turn it off.  Nothing changes. I want to cry or jab a toothpick in my head, I can’t decide which one.  The crying perpetuates crying and it’s no good.  Once I start, there’s no end in sight to the unfairness the universe bestows upon me.  I’m going to try one last ice pack and if it doesn’t work or put me to sleep I will have no choice but to cry myself into a state of total exhaustion.

Baker Street November 21, 2009

In this dream I am running across a field of tall dried grass followed by my father and my friend, Dave.  We’re trying to make our way to something which lies just across McLaughlin, a boulevard in Portland but in the true spirit of dreams I am in Florida, or maybe Iowa.
Past the boulevard I can see a ghost town with a pool and spa store.  The roads are dusty and wide, and no cars or horses line them.

My father does not look like he did when he died but he is the pre-Depakote skinny dad. He seems to be much more anxious about this situation than I.  I believe we are trying to straighten something out with someone and that we need to get to the Real Bad Guys before the Kind Of Bad Guys do.  These Kind Of Bad Guys, they don’t understand the gravity of it all and they are screwing around with our lives.

We are running through the empty buildings, up staircases and jumping on roofs. Eventually we find what we are looking for in a room with a large above ground pool and  a rubber ducky the size of a human.  The Bad Guys are here, waiting for my fathers breathless explanation.  They are Italian or Albanian and smirking at us while they listen.  I realize, although my father does not, that we are not in any real danger.  They were only trying to teach us a lesson.  I think Dave knew all along.